Unless something goes wrong, most spaceflights are little reported in the news. Monday’s launch of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, though, was an exception. Its all-female crew attracted a huge amount of attention, thanks in part to the inclusion of the pop star Katy Perry. The six women comprised the eleventh crew to fly on this vehicle, with previous passengers including company founder Jeff Bezos and Star Trek actor William Shatner.
These flights do not go into orbit. Instead, they briefly pop above the atmosphere to give the crew a short period of weightlessness and a fantastic view. The flights therefore might seem, in the grand scheme of space exploration, trivial. Yet they are a sign of revolutionary change. Humanity has worked out how to make rockets reusable, enabling massively better cost-effectiveness than could the single-use rockets of yore. This cost-effectiveness has resulted in an explosion of commercial space activity, of which the Katy Perry flight happens to be the most publicly visible part. As well as celebrity flights, reusable rockets have enabled more serious private missions, like the Fram2 mission that flew a crew into polar orbit last month. This is a feat that has never been accomplished by a state-run human spaceflight programme.
All this means that our species is picking up where it left off a half-century ago. When the Apollo Moon landings ended in 1972, humanity’s space exploration was cut short, despite our having the technology to continue it. Nasa shelved its plans for longer-duration Moon missions that would have used variations of the hardware that had already developed. The agency had hoped to build a permanent base that would then support expeditions to Mars, but the thwarting of these plans meant that the Moon, until recently, has been left largely untouched.
In the past few years, though, the Moon’s quietness has been once again disturbed. A flurry of unmanned probes have been sent to our nearest celestial neighbour, and both the United States and China plan to emulate and improve on the Apollo missions. Whichever of them is most successful will likely get to dominate the onward expansion of humanity into the solar system: Mars and beyond. As Jeff Bezos would probably agree, this would be a far more consequential development than this week’s New Shepard flight.
China’s lunar programme, Westerners ought to note, is going very well. In 2007 and 2008, China put spacecraft in lunar orbit. Since then, it has launched four surface probes, all of them landing successfully. These missions have enabled some impressive achievements, including an operation on the dark side of the Moon as well as the return of two lunar samples to Earth. In order to both increase the size of samples returned, and to demonstrate their space technology, the Chinese selected a more complex mission plan than the one used by the Soviets for the same purpose in the Seventies. It requires a craft to enter lunar orbit, send a separate lander to the lunar surface, rendezvous with the lander’s sample-bearing ascent stage, then return to Earth for re-entry and safe recovery. In the entire history of spaceflight, there have been only nine rendezvous performed in orbit around the Moon. Seven of these were Apollo lunar modules meeting their mothership after completing their missions; the other two were those modern Chinese missions, Chang’e 5 and 6.
The next step from here is an attempt to repeat the manoeuvres, but with astronauts involved. The CCP aims to get Chinese astronauts on the Moon before the end of the decade. Given the numerous delays to the Artemis programme, the Chinese have a good chance of being first, and might start by putting boots on the valuable lunar South Pole. Here there is water ice that can be used as a resource for further expansion. The Chinese astronauts will travel on the Long March 10 rocket. This craft, whose first test flight will be next year, has a conservative design that reuses tooling and engines from the already-flying Long March 5. Prototypes of the capsule it will carry have already been tested in space, and many of the technologies needed for the mission have already been mastered through the unmanned Chang’e programme. If successful, China will build a lunar research station with partners such as Russia.
It is unfortunate, then, that Nasa’s proposed Moon rocket appears not to be up to the task. The Space Launch System (SLS), as it is known, costs $4 billion per launch. Because it lacks the power to carry a lander alongside the capsule, it can take humans only to a Moon orbit rather than onto the lunar surface. And before doing any of that, SLS has to get off the ground. It has been in development since 2011 and has only achieved a single launch in that time, one that resulted in worrying damage to the heat shield of the capsule.. Nevertheless, NASA intends to use the rocket to send a crew on a single loop around the Moon by April of next year. A landing is pencilled in for 2027, but experts doubt this will be feasible.
The only clear advantage the US has at this point is in its commercial sector. It was private companies that built and launched the two Moon landers that touched down earlier this year, with the government acting merely as a customer. All in all, the frivolity of the Katy Perry mission should not be taken as being representative of the industry as a whole. In fact, it is a sign of confidence and health. Note that Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’ fiancée, was on board. What was once highly risky is becoming more routine. Blue Origin once again demonstrated its safe handling of liquid hydrogen — which is the rocket’s fuel — and its ability to bring a booster back to Earth under its own power. Both of these are technologies transferable to the company’s forthcoming lunar lander.
Launches will continue to multiply in number, principally because of the cost-effectiveness of reusable rockets. Already, the results have been spectacular. Over the past two years, the rate of mass being sent into orbit has accelerated by a compounding rate of 57% per year. This would represent an almost 10-fold increase in the next five years, and a 90-fold increase in the next 10 years. It is a trend comparable with the rapid rate at which transistors have been added to microchips over the past few decades — a key driver of the computer revolution.
SpaceX is upping the ante with Starship. Elon Musk envisages launching thousands of these enormous rockets every year. Even so, the trend cannot continue for ever. Ultimately, there will be a practical and an environmental limit to how much we can launch from the surface of the Earth. The critical metrics will remain the amount of mass we can put into space, and the cost of putting that mass into space. In order to keep the revolution going we will need to start deriving our payloads from materials elsewhere in the solar system.
This is why the Moon is so important. There is a rather dry space industry acronym — ISRU — that refers to in-situ resource utilisation. Do not be fooled by the dryness; ISRU will be transformative for our species. The shadowed craters at the lunar South Pole contain water ice and other volatile elements we can use to create rocket fuel akin to the hydrogen fuel used by the Katy Perry mission. Similarly, the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere can be used to produce fuel — but Mars, being on a solar orbit of its own, is accessible only once every 26 months. The Moon, although less hospitable, is a more convenient base for our species’ expansion. The stuff of science fiction can be made real, and it starts with collecting and processing rocks.
“The decisions made by the Elizabethans now shape our world in the 21st century, and likewise the decisions we make now regarding space will have ripples through the coming millennia.”
One of the first people to grasp this was the Princeton physics professor Gerard O’Neill. He and his students studied space colonisation from a scientific perspective, and came to the conclusion that planets were not the place to be. No other planet in the solar system has ideal conditions for humans, and the scope for expansion is limited to perhaps twice the surface area of Earth. They instead designed vast cities in space, cities that would take the form of rotating cylinders up to eight kilometres in diameter and 32 kilometres in length.
Being that large, the cities would have a mass of billions of tonnes. Even then, it was clear to O’Neill and his students that it would be impractical to send construction materials from Earth. With this consideration in mind, they devised a way of flinging lunar rock into space. A long series of magnetic coils, they forecast, could be used to fling lunar regolith — the dust and rocks on the Moon’s surface — into the region between Earth and the Moon. Here it would be caught by a similar coil mechanism, and subsequently broken down and used to build the city. The idea enraptured many young space enthusiasts, including a Princeton undergraduate called Jeffrey Bezos.
The example of the privately-operated moon landers, and the work of pioneers like O’Neill, show us the way. Space agencies should set objectives which private companies are free to pursue how they wish. These objectives should have, at their heart, the goal of rapidly developing the resources of the Moon and other celestial bodies. Nasa, and similar agencies, should fund this work generously.
And it is imperative that they do so. Whether the critics like it or not, humanity will populate the Solar System. What’s more, the sheer scale of the Solar System’s available energy and resources will mean this extraterrestrial population will be thousands of times larger than that of Earth. The population will descend only from those who go into the frontier, establish sustainable bases, and grow their population.
Those who stay behind will not have any input on the kind of civilisation that our descendants go on to build. Earth itself will be as irrelevant in the larger scheme of things as the tiny spot in Africa where Homo Sapiens first evolved is to modern geopolitics and culture. Are the people who populate the solar system going to believe in democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech? Or will they live under an autocratic system?
In 1576, Queen Elizabeth’s court astronomer John Dee made the case for colonisation of the New World. It was not an obvious economic priority for Tudor England. But it is partly because of Dee that the United States today speaks English and operates legal and political systems derived from our own. The decisions made by the Elizabethans now shape our world in the 21st century, and likewise the decisions we make now regarding space will have ripples through the coming millennia. If we lose the race to the CCP, we might have reason to reflect on one Katy Perry song in particular: “The One that Got Away.”
